Using processes of surface micromachining technology, it is possible to produce sensors, actuators and other miniaturized components according to methods that are known from a production of microelectronic components.
It is known that such processes used in surface micromachining technology for producing mechanical and/or electrical functional elements are subject to production process tolerances. In this manner, the term production tolerance is intended to designate the deviation from a setpoint which is expediently selected as the process mean value. As a rule, these production process tolerances result in high variations in the characteristic data of the mechanical or electrical functional elements in question, which must be provided for by balancing, compensation or calibration.
Examples for this are the sensitivity and the resonance frequency of the mentioned micromechanical capacitive acceleration sensor as a function of the trench etching process. In this trench etching process, the sensor is subdivided into a structure having trenches and bars, which contains the necessary functional elements, in this case, capacitor devices and spring devices.
Such production process tolerances, or process tolerances in short, are known to arise in trench etching (e.g., dry etching) due to varying process temperatures or process gas compositions or process gas flow rates, etc.
In general, it is desirable to produce micromechanical components with low characteristic data variation in order to avoid time-consuming and costly calibration processes, balancing processes or the like.
Consequently, one of the objects of the present invention is to keep the characteristic data variations as a function of process tolerances at a low level or to reduce them by a suitable arrangement of certain geometric design parameters.